1) German- I've always wanted to at least visit the country, though as a kid it was mostly so I could be nosy und listen in on my grandparents' private conversations that they had right in front of me. eue Also, it would make this German homework so much easier (I'm so far behind omg *grossly sobbing in a corner*).
2) Russian/Japanese- As a kid, I had a weird obsession with Russia und I always wanted to learn Japanese so I didn't have to wait for the English release of certain games. Now that obsession has kind of died off und I'm patient enough to wait, but I think it would still be neat to learn 'em for old time's sake.
3) Latin/Dead Languages in General- Because why not? There's a good chance not many people could read what you write/say, so at least you could swear at people with a smile und there's a good chance they won't understand what you're actually saying! Also, so I could write poems und make my step-grandmother/gullible folk freak out, thinking they're satanic ritualistic chants to summon demons to eat their souls or whatever.
@
Resilient
Another Duolingo user! I was using it for German, but wow I haven't been on it in forever. Good thing they stop sending notifications/emails telling you to study after awhile though.
1) German- I've always wanted to at least visit the country, though as a kid it was mostly so I could be nosy und listen in on my grandparents' private conversations that they had right in front of me. eue Also, it would make this German homework so much easier (I'm so far behind omg *grossly sobbing in a corner*).
2) Russian/Japanese- As a kid, I had a weird obsession with Russia und I always wanted to learn Japanese so I didn't have to wait for the English release of certain games. Now that obsession has kind of died off und I'm patient enough to wait, but I think it would still be neat to learn 'em for old time's sake.
3) Latin/Dead Languages in General- Because why not? There's a good chance not many people could read what you write/say, so at least you could swear at people with a smile und there's a good chance they won't understand what you're actually saying! Also, so I could write poems und make my step-grandmother/gullible folk freak out, thinking they're satanic ritualistic chants to summon demons to eat their souls or whatever.
@
Resilient
Another Duolingo user! I was using it for German, but wow I haven't been on it in forever. Good thing they stop sending notifications/emails telling you to study after awhile though.
1. Cat! Though I don't have a tail so I cant do cat body language :(
2. Latin, it sounds cool :3
3. The language of the Na'vi in Avatar (well thays kinda a joke
1. Cat! Though I don't have a tail so I cant do cat body language :(
2. Latin, it sounds cool :3
3. The language of the Na'vi in Avatar (well thays kinda a joke
no
1. Mandarin. I'm Chinese, but I only know limited Min/Hokkien. It's pretty much a dialect that no one speaks other than my family (at least who I know of), so I'd like to learn Mandarin to learn how to interact with other Chinese people :D
2. Russian. Today, a kid in my art class was talking to one of my friends, who lived in Russia at some point, in Russian and I was utterly amazed.
3. Japanese or Korean. I'm weeaboo/kpop trash, but I think they're both very pretty languages and would be very worthwhile to learn.
1. Mandarin. I'm Chinese, but I only know limited Min/Hokkien. It's pretty much a dialect that no one speaks other than my family (at least who I know of), so I'd like to learn Mandarin to learn how to interact with other Chinese people :D
2. Russian. Today, a kid in my art class was talking to one of my friends, who lived in Russia at some point, in Russian and I was utterly amazed.
3. Japanese or Korean. I'm weeaboo/kpop trash, but I think they're both very pretty languages and would be very worthwhile to learn.
1. Ancient Greek-When I think of all that great literature which I could read (translation lose a lot, I would love to understand Homer's epics and the original hexameter). And I won't start talking about all the tragedies, philosophy etc.
2. Latin-Similar reason as Greek. I tried to learn it but it was too hard for me.
3. Spanish-Just like how it sounds. And I adore Spanish culture!
@
Saivur
Saw you would like to learn Old Slavic...As somebody who studies it-trust me, no, you wouldn't want to. :D It's a horrible mess of a language, to be honest. And I doubt it would help to learn all the Slavic languages, since they're very diverse and changed a lot from what they were on the beginning. (Sorry for the random ping, but I get hyped when I see somebody talking about subjects I study...)
1. Ancient Greek-When I think of all that great literature which I could read (translation lose a lot, I would love to understand Homer's epics and the original hexameter). And I won't start talking about all the tragedies, philosophy etc.
2. Latin-Similar reason as Greek. I tried to learn it but it was too hard for me.
3. Spanish-Just like how it sounds. And I adore Spanish culture!
@
Saivur
Saw you would like to learn Old Slavic...As somebody who studies it-trust me, no, you wouldn't want to. :D It's a horrible mess of a language, to be honest. And I doubt it would help to learn all the Slavic languages, since they're very diverse and changed a lot from what they were on the beginning. (Sorry for the random ping, but I get hyped when I see somebody talking about subjects I study...)
@
Marmite
Well, aren't most of dead languages like that? The present day languages are usually much simpler than their ancestors so complicasy is to be expected. People used to see life differently back then - there was no rush. You can feel it when you read books written in, for example, 19th century: the people then considered travelling for weeks from one city to another something absolutely normal. Maybe that's why old laguages are often so complicated - people just didn't mind it.
And actually, if you know one of the Slavic languages you'll probably notice how you can read(and sometimes even understand) words from most of the other languages in this family. Not all of them though because while some are very similar to each other, the are ones that sound absolutely unlike all of the others. I find it very interesting :^D
By the way I'm surprised no one here who wants to learn Latin seems to have mentioned that it's the language of science. Because it is. Would be awesome to understand all the Latin animal names. :'D
@
Marmite
Well, aren't most of dead languages like that? The present day languages are usually much simpler than their ancestors so complicasy is to be expected. People used to see life differently back then - there was no rush. You can feel it when you read books written in, for example, 19th century: the people then considered travelling for weeks from one city to another something absolutely normal. Maybe that's why old laguages are often so complicated - people just didn't mind it.
And actually, if you know one of the Slavic languages you'll probably notice how you can read(and sometimes even understand) words from most of the other languages in this family. Not all of them though because while some are very similar to each other, the are ones that sound absolutely unlike all of the others. I find it very interesting :^D
By the way I'm surprised no one here who wants to learn Latin seems to have mentioned that it's the language of science. Because it is. Would be awesome to understand all the Latin animal names. :'D
@
Saivur
Have in mind that Old Slavic is very different from Old Greek or Latin in some aspects. It wasn't created by the native speakers, it was made by missionaries sent by church who wanted to chrisitianize the local pagans. The result was that hybrid between original Protoslavic language and Greek and most solutions were unnatural, forced and confusing for the original speakers and it quickly died out. The other big problem is the relatively small number of texts (compared to, for example, Greek) and they have inconsistent grammar and spelling (every monastery had it's own rules, even in the same region, which led to the absolute chaos). Of course, Latin is hard (tried to learn it, give up after two years), but it had much better composed system. I'll just say that Old Slavic had sixteen declensions (Latin has five, if I remember correctly). The language just had too much flaws.
And, actually, I know one Slavic language (or several of them, since linguists say that it's the same language and politicians that is not). :) However, it doesn't make things for me easier, although I'm a native Slav. I can read some of the other languages, but not much (a bit of Russian here and there, some Bulgarian). They are not similar as they sound, unfortunately. The territory where Slavs lived was huge with many different influences, naturally, the languages evolved on their own.
Sorry, for the long post. I'm a fanatic for these things...And it's incredibly rare to find somebody interested in Old Slavic anywhere, if you understand me. :D
@
Saivur
Have in mind that Old Slavic is very different from Old Greek or Latin in some aspects. It wasn't created by the native speakers, it was made by missionaries sent by church who wanted to chrisitianize the local pagans. The result was that hybrid between original Protoslavic language and Greek and most solutions were unnatural, forced and confusing for the original speakers and it quickly died out. The other big problem is the relatively small number of texts (compared to, for example, Greek) and they have inconsistent grammar and spelling (every monastery had it's own rules, even in the same region, which led to the absolute chaos). Of course, Latin is hard (tried to learn it, give up after two years), but it had much better composed system. I'll just say that Old Slavic had sixteen declensions (Latin has five, if I remember correctly). The language just had too much flaws.
And, actually, I know one Slavic language (or several of them, since linguists say that it's the same language and politicians that is not). :) However, it doesn't make things for me easier, although I'm a native Slav. I can read some of the other languages, but not much (a bit of Russian here and there, some Bulgarian). They are not similar as they sound, unfortunately. The territory where Slavs lived was huge with many different influences, naturally, the languages evolved on their own.
Sorry, for the long post. I'm a fanatic for these things...And it's incredibly rare to find somebody interested in Old Slavic anywhere, if you understand me. :D
@
Marmite
You shouldn't apologize for taking your time to write so much! I'm really interested in all of this so it's a great read for me. You know a lot of details. :'D
It's really sad that there is so little written documents of slavic origin that weren't destroyed by time. The avaliable materials for crafting mostly consisted of wood which isn't long-lasting, especially in cold climates. Researching history from just that sounds like an insanely complicated puzzle. But I guess that may just be the exciting part.
My first language is Russian and I found it surprising how I can read Polish and even understand some words despite the completely different alphabet. And it's not the only example I can give. In fact, most of the world's languages are connected as in one language you will often find words that were borrowed from another. Russian has a lot of words that have French and German origin, for example. So it's a usual occurence for me to stumble upon an english word that I already know the meaning of. :^D
You can talk to me about languages anytime! It's a great topic.
@
Marmite
You shouldn't apologize for taking your time to write so much! I'm really interested in all of this so it's a great read for me. You know a lot of details. :'D
It's really sad that there is so little written documents of slavic origin that weren't destroyed by time. The avaliable materials for crafting mostly consisted of wood which isn't long-lasting, especially in cold climates. Researching history from just that sounds like an insanely complicated puzzle. But I guess that may just be the exciting part.
My first language is Russian and I found it surprising how I can read Polish and even understand some words despite the completely different alphabet. And it's not the only example I can give. In fact, most of the world's languages are connected as in one language you will often find words that were borrowed from another. Russian has a lot of words that have French and German origin, for example. So it's a usual occurence for me to stumble upon an english word that I already know the meaning of. :^D
You can talk to me about languages anytime! It's a great topic.
@
Saivur
Yes, materials were a huge problem and the other thing which made it more complicated was the number of schools and scholars which wasn't big enough. However, it is sad that not many things were saved from that period. Things which we saved to these days are really magnificent, but there's just not enough of them. It is, indeed, a beautiful puzzle. The loss of probably very rich Slavic mythology always make me sad. We have only a fractures which were saved in the later folklore literature and few sources.
It's very interesting that you find Polish similar to Russian. While I always understood a lot of Russian, especially when I read it (Serbian is my native language, we also use Cyrillic), Polish was always an absolute mystery for me-I could barely catch few words when I tried to read it.
And, yes most European language are similar because they were one language at the beginning-Indo-European language (except Finnish, Hungarian and Greek, which are different and languages on their own). Slavic and German languages were close for very long time and it's not a surprise that they are incredibly similar. Only one group of language closer of Germanic to us was Baltic group, but, generally, if you carefully compare a word from most European (and some Indian!) languages, go few step backwards and remove sound and similar changes characteristic for them you'll be surprised.
The most obvious example is the word mother, which is similar in the all of them (German: mutter, French: mère, Hindi:M?? etc.) You can quickly see how much is English
I similar to Russian
? or Spanish
yo. But, the more word is complex, more are complex the changes which happened through the time when the languages became more distant. I enjoy finding those relations and you it's possible too start seeing relations everywhere with a bit of practice. It's a fun little game (or I'm just completely crazy, but I find this incredibly interesting and intriguing matter)...:D
@
Saivur
Yes, materials were a huge problem and the other thing which made it more complicated was the number of schools and scholars which wasn't big enough. However, it is sad that not many things were saved from that period. Things which we saved to these days are really magnificent, but there's just not enough of them. It is, indeed, a beautiful puzzle. The loss of probably very rich Slavic mythology always make me sad. We have only a fractures which were saved in the later folklore literature and few sources.
It's very interesting that you find Polish similar to Russian. While I always understood a lot of Russian, especially when I read it (Serbian is my native language, we also use Cyrillic), Polish was always an absolute mystery for me-I could barely catch few words when I tried to read it.
And, yes most European language are similar because they were one language at the beginning-Indo-European language (except Finnish, Hungarian and Greek, which are different and languages on their own). Slavic and German languages were close for very long time and it's not a surprise that they are incredibly similar. Only one group of language closer of Germanic to us was Baltic group, but, generally, if you carefully compare a word from most European (and some Indian!) languages, go few step backwards and remove sound and similar changes characteristic for them you'll be surprised.
The most obvious example is the word mother, which is similar in the all of them (German: mutter, French: mère, Hindi:M?? etc.) You can quickly see how much is English
I similar to Russian
? or Spanish
yo. But, the more word is complex, more are complex the changes which happened through the time when the languages became more distant. I enjoy finding those relations and you it's possible too start seeing relations everywhere with a bit of practice. It's a fun little game (or I'm just completely crazy, but I find this incredibly interesting and intriguing matter)...:D
@Marmite
[img]https://40.media.tumblr.com/d40a6b1a267d52397195896c4770bd84/tumblr_nuxlvy4zVV1rhwc3wo1_540.png[/img]
//Haha oh god fr crashed while I was writing but I got to take a screenshot. Dind't feel like re-typing so here we are...
The connections between languages imply that, at some point in history, humans were a single community with one language which evolved into all the different languages we have now as people spread throughout the world and lost connections with each other. It's pretty funny how people rediscovered other people despite coming from the same place originally. Although that does not apply to every nationality. Like finnish people - where did they come from? We just don't know. :^D
@
Marmite
//Haha oh god fr crashed while I was writing but I got to take a screenshot. Dind't feel like re-typing so here we are...
The connections between languages imply that, at some point in history, humans were a single community with one language which evolved into all the different languages we have now as people spread throughout the world and lost connections with each other. It's pretty funny how people rediscovered other people despite coming from the same place originally. Although that does not apply to every nationality. Like finnish people - where did they come from? We just don't know. :^D
